About this item
Multi-award winner, including a National Book Award, Jean Valentine published twelve full-length collections of poetry during her lifetime, and all of them - plus an entirely new, unpublished manuscript - can be found in this masterful collection of her life's work. The new poems acknowledge the inevitability of death while tenderly musing on what remains from a world left behind. The poems have an intricate balance between the sadness of a life lived and illuminating how the remaining love is steadfast, irreversible, and abiding even as we transcend from this earth. In her later years, Jean would write poems on napkins, random scraps of paper, and even on a typewriter, and those close to her would collect these writings and transcribe them into a Word document so they wouldn't be lost.
About the Author
Jean Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry, Break the Glass, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2010. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965 - 2003, was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. Valentine was the State Poet of New York from 2008-2010. She received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2009 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. She has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the NEA, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, The New York Council for the Arts, and The New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize, and The Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize in 2000. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.
